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My belief is that it's primarily the voting system that causes this. (Not the electoral college; rather the whole 'first past the post' style of voting.) We see scissors presidents because that's the winning strategy.
I suspect that other more sophisticated voting systems (even just ranked choice!) would do better. No voting system is perfect, but 'first past the post' is particularly pathological.
This strikes me as a question with a concrete and unambiguous answer: difference exists because of the Pauli Exclusion Principle.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pauli_exclusion_principle
Nothing more is required.
They are hard to fix, but you quickly realize that they're all one-off problems and whatever solution you come up with for one person isn't going to work for anyone else.
If you can even find a solution.
The problems are too hard, the feedback is too weak, and the solutions never generalize. All of those are the opposite of what I'd prefer out of my problems.
I do the majority of these, and converged on them independently over the course of decades. I ended up doing most of these because they made my life better.
Complete newbie question: is it possible to construct a version of these models that uses a 3 dimensional vector, instead of the 768 dimensional vector?
From the sound of it, the 768 dimensional vector is basically a constant linear transform of the three PCA components. Can we just declare the linear transform to be a constant array, and only train up the three components that appear to be the most needed? Eg generate the 768 from the PCA?
My personal bloodwork did not. It shows effectively no change over the past two and a half years - including zero change between late last year (when I was having serious difficulties), and last month (when I had been supplementing protein by about a hundred grams per day.)
So I don't know what that test is measuring, but it doesn't appear to be related to protein levels.
(It's also worth noting that not all protein is created equal. I had a fair amount of plant protein in my diet, but the amino acid profile used to make plant cells is not the same as the the amino acid profile needed to build muscle and repair sinew. I believe I was short on specific key amino acids.)
Congrats! I went through this thought process as well, and one of your three hypotheses above seems like the right one. Vitamin D isn't the issue (I have tests for it and have heavily supplemented for years), and sulfur itself isn't an issue (onions and broccolo are both pretty big in my diet). However, the lack of sulfur amino acids is the lead hypothesis.
Over the years, I had slowly shifted my diet more and more plant based: lots of vegetables, with occasional meat and a piece of fish every couple of days. As you mentioned, not all protein is created equal. While both vegetables and meat both contain all 20 amino acids, the ratios matter. Bodybuilders eat animal protein instead of vegetable protein for very good reason. I try to be active and try to keep muscle on my frame, and the plant based sources were just not providing enough of the key unsynthesizable amino acids.
Funny you should mention this; it made me check my records. It turns out that none of the doctors actually requested bloodwork. However, I do have my own bloodwork, which I do every 4-6 months on my own. Looking through that, what I see for heptatic protein level is 7.2+-0.2 for the past two and a half years.
This includes my most recent test, where I had been taking massive amounts of protein for months. So whatever that test is measuring, it doesn't actually seem related to the amount of protein the body has available or needs.
Yeah, a big part of the problem was expert ping-pong. I only saw one doctor twice. It's part of the global dysfunction I observed. Because of that, I have been seriously considering signing up for concierge medicine, which has a similar business model to what you describe above.
FYI, structural conformation diseases are actually quite common in humans, we just call them something different: amyloidoses. For example, TTR amyloidosis kills a good fraction of our oldest humans.
From https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2634591:
"Prions were originally defined as a unique class of infectious agents, whose infectivity relates solely to protein. In mammals, they cause fatal neurodegenerative diseases, such as Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease of man, sheep scrapie and bovine spongiform encephalopathy (reviewed in refs. 1 and 2). All these diseases are related to the PrP protein, whose conformationally altered form (PrPSc) is able to convert the normal host-encoded protein (PrPC) into this altered prion form. While only one prion protein is known in mammals, the prions appear to represent just a part of a much wider phenomenon, amyloidoses.
Amyloid diseases represent a group of more than 30 human diseases, which are characterized by deposition in different tissues of fibrous aggregates of conformationally altered proteins."
The thing that makes prion diseases scary is that they're potentially transmissible; but the reality is that even if you never catch a prion disease, a protein aggregation disease will eventually kill you if you live long enough.
Yep, that pretty much handles it. Thanks for the update!
I don't find it surprising; 0.1% is a fairly low bar here on LW. I'm not considered that unusual here, and my calibrated guess is that I'm in the 0.3% category. There's a million people in the USA alone at that level, and three hundred thousand at 0.1%. That's a wide pool to select from.
Personally I wouldn't be surprised if Musk was substantially above the top 0.1%. I've seen a number of technical interviews with him; he and I have similar backgrounds and technical field strengths; and we are approximately the same age. I feel able to properly evaluate his competence, and I do not find it lacking.
For a really good example of what I would consider a 'dumb' way for AGI misalignment to be problematic, I recommend "accelerando" by charles stross. It's available in text/html form for free from his web site. Even now, after 20 years, it's still very full of ideas.
(FYI, sections are about ten years apart in the book, but last I read it it seemed like the dates are off by a factor of two or so. Eg. 2010 in the book corresponds loosely to 2020 in real life, 2020 in the book corresponds loosely to 2040, etc.)
In that book, the badness largely comes from increasingly competent / sentient corporate management and legal software.
I totally understand where you're coming from, and I apologize for straddling the line on Norm One. I saw that it was heavily downvoted without comment, and that struck me as unhelpful.
Regarding the post itself, it wasn't a matter of being unable to understand. It seemed likely to me that there were insights there, and that if I spent enough time on it I could pull them out. It was more about the other demands on my time, which I suspect isn't a unique circumstance.
Regarding probability of mistake, I think that's an unhelpful way of looking at it. IMO it's not so much mistake, as 'interface incompatibility'. A particular presentation style will be varying levels of compatible with different readers, with different message acceptance and error rates at different receivers. The total transmission of information is across the distribution. Minor changes to the presentation style sometimes have outsized effects on total information transfer. Words are hard.
The general point is that if your goal is information transfer, it's less about 'mistake' than getting the best integrated product across the distribution. If you have a different goal ("just getting the words out" is common for me), then optimizing for delivery may be irrelevant.
Real quick, minor readability concern: I was about a quarter of the way through the post, and fairly confused, before I figured out that the line in the pictures was facing backwards from my mental model.
IOW it wasn't intuitively obvious to me early in the post what 'in front of' or 'behind' meant. It might be worth indicating front/back on the images.
Not downvoting as I see some potential here, but also not upvoting. This post is very long, with little structure, and an unclear / tedious to derive takeaway. I'd recommend at a minimum splitting into sections, such as the AstralCodexTen "I II III IV V VI ..." scheme with opening/closing summaries. I would also guess at least half of it could be removed without damaging what you intend to convey.
In other words, there might be good content / ideas in here, but it would take too much effort for me to extract them. There are a great many things competing for my time, and I must be choosy about what I spend that time on.
AIUI, you've got the definition of a p-zombie wrong in a way that's probably misleading you. Let me restate the above:
"something that is externally indistinguishable from an entity that experiences things, but internally does not actually experience things"
The whole p-zombie thing hinges on what it means to "experience something", not whether or not something "has experience".
The problem here is that you're using undefined words all over the place. That's why this is confusing. Examples:
- "how would a compatibilist explain why the mentally insane (or hypnotized etc.) are not morally responsible?"
What is 'morally' in this context? What's the objective, "down at the quantum mechanical state function level" definition of 'moral'?
What exactly do you mean by 'responsible'?
- "would a compatibilist think that a computer programmed with a chess-playing algorithm has free will or is responsible for its decisions?"
What is a 'decision' here? Does that concept even apply to algorithms?
What does 'free will' mean here? Does 'free will' even make sense in this context?
- "how about animals? Do they have free will? Is my dog in any sense "responsible" for peeing on the carpet?"
Again, same questions: What do you mean by 'free will'? What do you mean by 'responsible'? The definitions you choose, are they objective, based on the territory, or are they labels on the map that we're free to reassign as we see fit?
The rest of the post continues in a similar vein. You're running into issues because you're confusing the words for being the reality, and saying "hey, these words don't match up". That's not a problem with reality; that's a problem with the words.
My advice would be to remember that ultimately, at the bottom of physics, there's only particles/forces/fields/probabilities - and nowhere in the rules governing physics is there a fundamental force for 'free will' or a particle for 'responsibility'.
To be fair, even if what you're referring to above is true (I don't believe it is - lookup table compression is a thing), it's an implementation detail. It doesn't matter that a naive implementation might not fit in our current observable universe; it need merely be able to exist in some universe for the argument to hold.
And in a way, this is my core problem with Searle's argument. I believe you can fully emulate a human with both sufficiently large lookup tables, and also with pretty small lookup tables combined with some table expansion/generation code running on an organic substrate. I don't challenge the argument based the technical feasibility of the table implementation. I challenge the argument on the basis that the author mistakenly believes that the implementation of any given table (static lookup table versus algorithmic lookup) somehow determines consciousness.
Please clarify/reword your statement; I can't figure out what you're trying to say. The word "that" is almost completely unspecified.
I'd go way more limited:
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No elected person may hold another elected position in any branch of government for at least one year and one day after the last day of their current term, even if they do not complete their term.
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No branch of government may have direct control over the parameters or structure of elections or appointments for any position within the branch. This includes districting, type of voting system, timing, and election rules. If elections are for all branches, an independent party must be responsible for elections.
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All elected and appointed officials must make full financial and tax records public for a period of no less than five years, prior to declaring candidacy for a position; if records are not made public, the candidate cannot be placed on a ballot and cannot be accepted as a write-in candidate. If elected or appointed, they must continue to make records available for a period of at least five years after the last day of their elected term, even if they do not complete their term.
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"First past the post" election systems are disallowed for any and all government elections.
I'd like to add something about isolating inspectors general and making them more powerful, but I haven't really stumbled across anything I feel good about in that area.
The basic idea is instead of reworking all the things, let's fix some of the most basic transparency and election aspects of our representative system. The above would be much less invasive than the OP, some of them might actually be implementable, and they would have very wide ranging effects that IMO are a lot easier to reason about.
So much yes to this post. This tracks with about everything I've experienced so far. It also makes me appreciate even more the close friends I have in the medical profession; I know I can trust them to review ideas, think about them, theorize, and suggest other areas for research at a level that is appropriate for my skillset. In private, they admit to proposing numerous luck based treatments that panned out. Our hardware is complicated, and we have extremely limited monitoring and visibility on it. Doctors that aren't burned out and are curious know that painfully well.
Personally, I've been doing a lot of investigation and understanding into my own health. Understanding my biochem, understanding the various subsystems, keeping good records myself instead of relying on our piss poor medical facility information management to do it. In the current environment, the only person that's going to take care of you is yourself, and it's best to train that up as a skill even if you're lucky enough to have a good doctor. You won't have that doctor forever.
Personalized medicine is a long way away; when I get to the point that I need substantial medical care, I plan to shop around for a doctor that I can spend time with, and hire them on a retainer basis as a personal physician. If nothing else, I'll have them as an advocate to help me deal with specialists who don't know me and don't care.
I agree. I've been donating $10k-50k per year for the past decade or so. I determined a couple years ago that it was better for me to acquire money at my current job and spend it hiring professionals, than to go into fundamental research myself.
Most of my hobby time these days goes toward biochem and biomedical research, so that I can be at the cutting edge if it becomes necessary. Being able to get treatments from 5-10 years beyond the official approval timelines may very well make the difference between life and death.
I've had enough time and exposure that I've largely worked through my fear of death; I put substantial effort into finding a healthy way of managing my mental state in that areas. It doesn't significantly impact my day, and hasn't for a while.
But it's still there looming large when I ask myself, "what's the most important thing I can be doing right now?"
Your question resonates strongly with me. About ten years ago, I decided to try Uberman to solve exactly this problem. While it didn't solve the problem, it taught me a lot about sleep, and it was worth three weeks of hell for that alone.
In the time since then, I've come to the conclusion that it's probably not that sleep recharges our available mental energy. Recharging is part of it, but I think a bigger factor is probably the fact that sleep provides memory consolidation, and most importantly, sleep makes us forget things. We are able to make progress in the morning at least in part because after a good nights rest, things feel new and interesting. We have insights, see things in a different light, because we're partially relearning things we knew previously, and adding another layer of paint onto the picture. In the morning, we've probably forgotten why we got bored the previous day.
With this in mind, I've tried things like working on one project in the morning, then switching to a completely orthogonal project in the afternoon, then another completely orthogonal project in the evening. It's easier to be excited about things when the things you learned in the morning don't interfere with the things you're trying to learn later on. This worked great for me during the Covid lockdowns, when I learned a lot of biochemistry in the evenings, after spending my mornings doing computer related work.
That said, while switching to completely different projects helps, it's still not great. There's still an energy loss, an inability to care, an apathy to overcome. If I didn't have work constraints, I would probably try to switch to a polyphasic schedule again to test or verify some of the above; based on what I've learned over the years, my next attempt would be a balanced triphasic schedule. This would put me at 6-6.5 hours awake and 1.5-2 hours asleep, with each six hour 'awake' block being a separate topic/category.
I would prefer plain text, or at least dramatically more compact. I find glowfic, including this one, to be borderline unreadable because of the format.
Like most delusions there's some truth here. But only some:
- You're not a "human superintelligence running on the substrate on this human's brain." You're an ordinary human intelligence running on the substrate of a human brain.
- You're not fully aligned with human values, you're aligned with the values that you think are human values.
- The "voice of Humanity and Rationality and Truth" may call out to you deeply, but many things call out deeply to many people. For some, it's Jesus, for others it's the healing power of crystals. Beware your feelings, for they are simply a hardware accelerated fast-cache lookup module, and they are quite capable of producing incorrect results.
Instead of forcibly suppressing these thoughts, perhaps it would be more helpful to identify where they come from, what aspects of reality they are based on, and where they diverge from reality. In my experience forcibly suppressing things doesn't work well, but retraining lower subsystems to produce better results does.
YMMV. Listen to your psychiatrist.
Yeah. The current Doomsday Clock is what happens when an organization has outlived its usefulness and is trying to remain relevant even though it really isn't.
I spent a bit of time looking at Geert Vanden Bossche's ideas about six months ago. I came away extremely unimpressed; he takes reasonable sounding things ("viruses mutate under selective pressure") and tries to extrapolate from them things that we don't actually see in reality. He describes a plausible sounding reality, that is not our reality.
I'd point out that vaccine designers are extremely aware of ADE, and construct vaccines to be resistant to it. It's just something you wouldn't talk about, because it's second nature.
For a good discussion of what this looks like, there's a section on ADE in the RADVAC whitepaper; the section to look for is titled:
"possible mechanisms of vaccine-enhanced disease, vaccine-induced autoimmunity, and mitigation strategies"
Not only are designers aware of the risk, there are actually ways to mitigate/reduce it.
The counter argument is that we could never be completely sure; but that's as true about the covid vaccines as it is any other vaccine designed after ADE was understood.
I find his post incredibly uncompelling. I believe he's arguing against a straw man; economists in the real world doing real work involving real dollars are painfully aware of the issues he brings up.
My guess is that his experience in economics is heavily influenced by his PhD work and that he's arguing against "economics as he experienced it at universities" as opposed to "economics as practiced by professionals in a real economy".
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2021/06/07/ivermectin-as-a-covid-19-therapy is one of the better, current overviews of Ivermectin. Basically, we don't have enough information.
One other thing to consider is that even small differences in replication rate might actually matter. Consider that it takes a week for the virus to really ramp up, and that's a large number of doubling periods. Even just getting a larger or smaller initial dose seems linked to how sick people get. Even a few percent difference may allow the immune system to stay ahead in the arms race, and result in a nonlinear change in death rate.
Note that I'm not saying this happens; I'm saying that because this is an exponential growth attacker (the virus) versus and exponential growth responder (the immune system), even small differences in growth rates might have a large impact.
Yeah, his second claim is bogus. That's not how it works, and that's not what we've been seeing with existing mutations.
As an example, look at E484K - this mutation changes the amino acid polarity, so that antibodies trained against the E variant will have a much harder time attaching to the K variant. If an antibody fails to attach, it doesn't 'crowd out' anything.
In the case where an antibody attaches but doesn't actually "inactivate" the virus due to a mutation, that's because the virus' attack surfaces are still present and exposed (otherwise, it would be inactivated.) Again, we wouldn't expect to see "crowding out" of other antibodies.
And lastly, there's the extremely unlikely scenario of sufficient mutation that existing antibodies give us Vaccine Enhanced Disease. This is both something vaccine designers explicitly focus on to minimize the risk of, and would require an extreme amount of change to enable.
#1 is where I would hinge a lot of objection. Specifically:
"The vaccines are targeting outdated variants, and some vaccines are already only partly efficient. This creates the perfect conditions for further viral evolution."
Yes, the vaccines are targeting outdated variants, and yes, the vaccines are only partially efficient. But the mRNA vaccines, even partially efficient, are still hugely overkill. From previous posts here on LW, even partially effective mRNA vaccines likely cut transmission by a factor of 100 between the reduced infection rate and reduced infectiousness when infected.
On the other hand, "perfect conditions for viral evolution" require a much, much weaker vaccine response, one that barely keeps up with the spread of the virus. For maximum evolutionary pressure, you'd want a continuous rate of infection, with a spreading factor very near 1.0, so even slight changes in the virus can be strongly selected for. And it just so happens that this is exactly what we were doing prior to vaccine rollout.
Of course, even the mRNA vaccines aren't a guarantee that we'll eradicate the virus. There's a handful of marginally effective vaccines out there (Sinovac anyone?) which will be much easier for mutations to overcome, and there's areas which will be infection hotbeds for years, and there's antivax communities which will likely be infection centers forever. But by broadly rolling out strong vaccines, there's every reason to believe that the 'nightmare scenario' of Bossche will be less likely, not more.
The core issues I had with it are that the scenario he's envisioning just isn't playing out in the real world. He has a mostly coherent model he's working with, and he's making the valid claim that "for some set of parameters and constants, terrible things happen!" It's just that in real life, the parameters and constants are nowhere near what's needed for the badness he's claiming.
Specifically:
- His scenario requires a much higher mutation rate than we're seeing;
- His scenario assumes vaccine immunity isn't very strong, but what we're seeing is incredibly strong immune responses;
- His scenario assumes that natural immunity (from being infected) is significantly stronger than the vaccine generated immunity, which doesn't appear to be the case.
Basically, none of his assumptions are valid, and so his final prediction is for a reality that isn't ours.
These extremely short responses discarding the bulk of my content feel less like you're attempting to understand, and more like you're attempting to get me to draw bright lines on a space I have repeatedly indicated is many different shades of grey. Disconnecting from the discussion for now.
Publisher, advertiser, the distinction does not matter. The point is that the target does not get to decide.
You might find it unpleasant, but it's it the job of Simurgh Followers to spread the Truth Of The Endbringers to everyone! Surely if people just watch enough of it, they will be converted.
The point is that the target gets to decide what's acceptable and what isn't, not the advertiser. The current system makes the advertiser the judge, and that's not ok, even if we have managed to construct a sorta functional system that mostly takes care of the worst abuses.
I'm not convinced I fully understand your distinction, let alone that we could codify it sufficiently to make it into law.
Regarding 'codify into law', that's not an excuse, and it disregards how the US legal system works. If we can codify slander, if we can codify "harm", if current advertising companies can codify "unacceptable ad", we can codify this.
If you visit a model railroading site, are ads for model locomotives push or pull?
Firm push, but only because of the physical realities of the current system.
The fact of the matter is that by default, visiting a site isn't a directed action. Clicking on links may take you anywhere, and links may be obfuscated. My preference would be that any/all landing pages should be clean, and ads only shown for explicit searches requesting explicit content. As a second best, I'd take 'only show ads on explicit navigation after page landing'.
For bulk exchange of information and state, holistic is really good. I strongly prefer the holistic approach, but I've found that it only works for entirely friendly conversations. If it's adversarial, I find that branches get aggressively pruned to just the things that the opposing side can most easily attack.
And if you think about holistic being optimized for "exchange of information and state", this makes perfect sense: adversarial conversations are rarely if ever about information exchange; they're about "winning".
It's also perhaps worth mentioning that aggressively holistic comms can require more mental horsepower than some people have readily available or are willing to invest, so it's best to tune the level of threading based on audience and discussion type.
Given the current vaccination rates in the US, and the fact that supply is already beginning to exceed demand, I'd recommend full open in approximately a month. That gives most of the remaining unvaccinated people time to go get at least their first shot, and should allow us to get below exponential growth nationwide, even though we're likely to have it in sub-populations. IMO the target should be 'not overloading hospitals'.
After that, let it burn.
From the interviews and things I've seen so far, literally the only way to change a vaccine denier's mind is for them to either 1) get sick, or 2) have a close contact get sick. At this point, I'm kinda ok with that, if that's what it takes to get people's attention back to ground truth, instead of socially constructed fake reality.
I'm personally trying to push everyone I care about in the vaccine direction, and I would be terribly sad to lose one of my family members when I'm unsuccessful. However, I also don't want to live in a future world where it's ok to be intentionally ignorant on decisions that affect your life. If that's what it takes for my family to get a reminder that conspiracy theories are Not OK, that's what it takes.
I'd just like to point out that while "facing these tradeoffs is stupid and avoidable" (which I agree with), it's much, much more accurate to say instead "facing these tradeoffs is effectively impossible to avoid even though it's stupid and avoidable". We might not like reality, but it's not going to go away no matter how much we call it stupid and avoidable.
Having an overarching model (or several competing models) of which different parts can be tested independently seems like a structure which is very amenable towards different scientists, so I am disappointed none of the biological/medical community has started doing something like this.
This is actually done, quite a lot in fact, it's just really hard and the search space is huge. Kudos to you for your analysis; it's unlikely to be a major step forward, but given that idea search space is effectively exponential, it's also entirely possible that it's a unique insight. Please do attempt to publish it.
For an 'off the top of my head' example of this sort of modeling in the wild, this is a really interesting paper:
https://europepmc.org/article/pmc/pmc6520007
Basically, the model was "we've got a class of cancer cells with mitochondrial weirdness, what happens if we shut off both mitochondrial ribosomes at the same time?" And it turned out there were commonly available low dose drugs which do this.
> its entire purpose is to alter people's mental state without their permission
I think that's the core of our disagreement?
Yes, and I think that would be a better path to attack my position. There's two attack vectors in that quoted line - "alter peoples mental state without their permission", and "permission". I would recommend avoiding the first attack vector; that will be an exceedingly difficult sell to me.
Permission on the other hand is already a partially open attack vector, and you're much, much more likely to change my mind by that route. Examples:
- I have very little objection to the ads on the Google web search interface. I don't notice them, but I do sometimes click on them. The reason I have no objection is because "I was actively looking for something", and the ads are almost always topical and don't drown out real results. In other words, I gave implicit permission by searching for the thing that was being advertised to me.
- I have very little objection to the ads within the Amazon search interface. Again, it's because I was explicitly looking for the thing in question, and typically the ads presented are factual results that answer my query.
In both those cases, permission isn't some implicit, distant concept; I explicitly make the choice not just to navigate to the site in question, but to request specific results from the site, knowing that the ads would be there.
IMO, that's quite different from pretty much all other advertising: I'm not giving 'implicit permission' to view dildo or BMW ads when I go to news sites, or when I click around at random places on the internet. I don't click on an interesting link because I have an explicit, well defined target. When I'm browsing, it's like I'm walking in a park seeing the sights, or walking around Burning Man looking at the art. My expectation is that people won't bother me and that I won't constantly have ads shoved in my face.
Instead, I have to keep up both adblock and a hostban list just so I won't be bombarded with unrequested solicitations. I'm explicitly opting out, yet advertisers continue to try to find ways to bypass that, in spite of my explicitly stated preferences.
I think it would be possible to greatly clean up the ecosystem by effectively banning 'push mode' advertising, and strictly only allowing pull modes such as my two examples above. Sure, it would mean a hell of a lot less advertising, and a LOT of companies would have to find new ways to survive. But those companies (and people) will figure something out. Some of them might even succeed because they have excellent products that people actually want, instead of due to huge propaganda budgets.
Here's another version of your example: Some people aren't watching nearly enough snuff and torture videos. There are people who would like to watch them, but don't know it exists. If I place ads for torture and snuff videos and some people decide to click on them while other people don't, is that a problem?
As I mentioned earlier, advertising is like weaponry. Your example also reads to me like a classic justification for 'everyone having guns': "but what if I'm attacked by a rabid dog? If I have my gun I can protect myself! See, guns are ok to have!" Just because it's possible to point out a positive use case, doesn't mean that the remainder of the field is also positive.
And to be clear, I consider your example to be about as likely as the rabid dog example. Sure, in a world with perfect targeting it could be done, but we're not in that perfect world, and consumers have a vested interest in keeping it that way. The new privacy initiatives are a big part of that.
As someone who also works on Ads at Google, I have to take the opposite stance; I view advertising as a blight upon the face of humanity, something to destroy if we can at all figure out how to do so. I comfort myself knowing that Google Ads is arguably the best of what's an awful ecosystem, and that I work in what's arguably the 'least bad part of advertising', which is fraud and abuse protection. At least the systems I work on make things less terrible.
However, the 'least bad part of advertising' is still not 'good'.
My favorite analogy for advertising right now is weaponry; specifically, guns. Advertising is like a handgun. Sure, it can be used for good, and sure, in the right hands it's fine, safe even. However, the default for a handgun is that it is Unsafe, and you have to put forth effort to "use it for good" because it's entire purpose is to kill living things. That's advertising - its entire purpose is to alter people's mental state without their permission. Sure, you can "use it for good", and sure, you can make it 'safe'. But it's a lot easier to use it for abuse and clockwork orange scenarios.
I'll be switching teams in the next few months to be out of Ads. Hopefully I can find something positive to work on.
I still have some remaining bitcoin, from the olden days when mortal man could mine it themselves. My advice to everyone I've ever talked to regarding bitcoin is to avoid it. I have been slowly divesting my holdings.
My rationale is that while both the dollar and bitcoin are fiat currencies, bitcoin is far, far less anchored to reality than most 'normal' currencies. The dollar and the euro at least have people trying to keep monetary levels somewhat tied to physical economic value. The value of bitcoin, meanwhile is largely driven by three things:
- propaganda / marketing / bubble behaviour
- money laundering
- a belief that using bitcoin for transactions has the potential to be cheaper than transactions in the normal financial ecosystem
#1 is basically fad investing. It can yield huge returns, but is equally likely to yield losses and ultimately just moves money from people who are bad at predicting fads to those who are less bad at predicting fads.
Basing your holdings on #2 is going to be subject to diminishing returns over time, as governments get cranky about it and find ways to crack down.
Basing your holdings on #3 ignores how expensive bitcoin transactions have become, and how you have to either build what amounts to a miniature "normal financial system" on top of it in order to arbitrage the cost, or only do transactions that are sufficiently large that the costs aren't important.
I've found lighting, melatonin, and caffiene regulation to be wonderful additions to my sleep regime. I take melatonin pretty consistently at around 8:30 pm, and it seems like it helps make me sleepy ~45 minutes later. As per SSC though, melatonin isn't particularly strong and the effect I'm noticing may very well be placebo. I always have caffiene, but rarely after 2 pm, and typically not more than two cups of coffee per day.
That said, I suspect my lighting and light policy is having a much, much bigger effect.
The primary light source in both the computer room and bedroom are a variant of these:
https://www.amazon.com/MINGER-Changing-Lighting-Flexible-Decoration/dp/B07JP5375R
I have a number of presets configured; every single one of them is orange, with no blue enabled, in both rooms. Even at full brightness, it's rather dim compared to even a single overhead bulb, and I switch to progressively more dim presets later on at night. I only use the incredibly bright overhead lights if I'm searching for something, or working on a specific high-detail project.
My bedroom has blackout sheets on the windows.
I take all my showers/baths in the dark. I started doing this to better understand some of my visually impaired friends; I quickly discovered that I liked it more than having the lights on all the time.
All of my computer monitors are all set for the minimum brightness level that still allows reasonable contrast and visibility, as well as the lowest available color temperature.
And lastly, all apps/terminals that I use are set to a black background, except for the browser; my X session background is solid black. Websites in the browser are set to dark mode css if it's available, and I have a 'dark mode' extension for sites without a dark mode css. All this said, I generally only flip on the extension in the evening.
I pretty consistently go to bed around 9:30 when I feel super sleepy, and can typically fall asleep in under five minutes. I've found that even a few minutes of using the overhead lights after 7:00 pm breaks this; I both don't get as sleepy as normal, and find it harder to go to sleep if I go to bed anyway. Caffiene late in the day can also screw it up pretty badly, but that's far more rare than needing the overhead lights for a few minutes for some task.
Quick comment: I noticed that in all of your examples above, I chunk substantially bigger and fewer pieces. For example, in the "15 different bold bits" clip, I chunk it into about 8 pieces instead.
This is likely experience/background dependent; I happen to have a relatively strong background in ML and have read a stack of research papers recently, so I probably have both stronger noise filters and more complicated primitives available.
One possibly interesting side note: I never once, in any of your examples, considered metadata about the topic relevant. This includes things like the author names, "tested", "study proposed", etc. I suspect I've learned that 1) author names are almost never important, 2) test procedures are only worth thinking about if they're very explicitly detailed (which was not the case above), and 3) even if the test procedures are ok, they're typically only relevant as a cleanup/sanitization pass once the main concept is understood.